RE: [xml-dev] Text Markup Part II

[Michael Hopwood <michael@editeur.org>]

That's right - it comes with the broadening of a "school" of thought/markup into an accepted part of a "discipline", then finally a "standard" way of approaching texts (new or old).

Although my point about classical Latin/Greek and Christian text preservation in the "Western Tradition" was a bit of fun and interest for me, it's actually illustrative of the fact that until (very) there was in fact very little opportunity to radically revise and transform texts (deliberately and without fear of forever losing the original) the way we do with printing, copying and digital methods.

Hence there was a very niche market for "languages" like this (one could argue it's still fairly niche)... but as Toby says at length, identifying and relating documentary entities (according to your point of view!) is an old, old business. The languages existed and were actually reasonably formal (when needed, e.g. explaining to Martin Luther that the "Holy Table of Contents" ;) was not up for debate)...

Well, you can take this train of thought as far as you like, as formally as you like, and in very disparate spheres of interest - note that the use cases result in very different "styles" and "forms" of markup:

http://www.editeur.org/files/Collaborations/Publications/Publishers%20Requirements%20for%20Identifying%20Components%20-%20an%20EDItEUR%20discussion%20paper.pdf

http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1201/1201.0385.pdf

http://www.biblestudymagazine.com/interactive/canon/

http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/3259-bible-canon

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chapters_and_verses_of_the_Bible 

-----Original Message-----
From: Mike Sokolov [mailto:sokolov@ifactory.com] 
Sent: 20 January 2012 14:36
To: Michael Hopwood
Cc: dlee@calldei.com; xml-dev@lists.xml.org
Subject: Re: [xml-dev] Text Markup Part II

I think there's another important piece here, which is defining an entire vocabulary; a little mini-language, so you could have the concepts of validity, and some meta-document (dtd, schema, what have
you) for defining the tags within that vocabulary.  You can't do that if you just say, let tags appear wherever.  The root element (along
w/DOCTYPE) seems to have acted as a label for that.  That method for identifying a vocabulary is definitely an historic artifact, but you'd have to have *some* mechanism for it that would be sort-of global to a document.

-Mike

On 01/20/2012 07:14 AM, Michael Hopwood wrote:
>>>> What I'm trying to get at is the fundamental rational between  what appears to be two extremes not necessarily compatible, and why we ended up with only the later.
>>>>          
> Actually, and for a very long time before it became "cool" ;) to talk about this, it's really only been the latter, except that the "markup" for the rest of the document is implicit. Adding a "root" tag for the whole document simply formalises and makes machine-readable (although you could have done this a variety of other ways, like filename extensions) what "documentalists" of all kinds have been doing for a very long time; (more or less formally) identifying integral units of documentation.
>
> A MARC21 serialisation has message headers to separate different catalogue records in the stream - those are short documents, generally, although they can potentially get very long. And every element, as well as the whole thing, is marked up.
>
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